Payment processing with PayPal

on Jun 16, 2013

DojoExpert can now be integrated with your PayPal account so that you can collect payments from your students via this secure and reliable payment processor. This feature is available only in DojoExpert PRO package, and here’s how it works:

1. You enter your paypal e-mail address into DojoExpert interface and enable the feature (we don’t need your PayPal password!)
2. We give you IPN notificationi URL that you enter into your PayPal account. IPN stands for “Instant payment notification”. For all payments that you receive, the IPN will be sent to the IPN URL – this way we can collect payment information: amount, payer name, email etc. We do not collect your money, they will go to your PayPal account, we only get information about the payment. DojoExpert then based on the information in IPN notification, closes the appropriate invoice.
3. You can monitor the IPN-s received in DojoExpert interface. If some payments did not close the invoice, you can “resolve” the issues in IPN monitor interface.
4. Your students can pay invoices by login in into members area. There, every unpaid invoice will have “Pay with PayPal” button.

Ok, now, let’s get into more details how to setup your account for accepting PayPal payments:

When your student clicks the button he will be redirected to secure PayPal interface to pay the selected invoice:

Once the payment has been made, the invoice in DojoExpert will be closed immediately. You can check this in “invoices” or in IPN monitor:

Here you can see who made the payment. Columns to monitor are: UID (unique ID of your student), invoice # (the invoice number) and status (if the invoice is closed ok with this payment the status will be “resolved”). If you open the invoice in DojoExpert you can see that it’s paid and in header you can see the TXN_ID (PayPal transaction ID) reference:

Since IPN notification URL will collect all payments messages that you receive in your PayPal account, maybe some payments are not related to invoice payments. Or, some student will send you payment manually, not via paypal button in members area. This way the DojoExpert system can’t really know what invoice to close. In this case you can use IPN monitor to “resolve” such payments and close the appropriate invoice.

Recurring payments

If you want to setup recurring payments so that you can bill your students automatically via PayPal, please read this blog post.